Focusing on Virginia Woolf and her circle, past and present

Woolf sightings: A miscellany

The past week offers a miscellany of Woolf sightings, from Woolf-style instructions for preparing Clafoutis Grandmère (#18) to her epitaph (#4) to a paean to beautiful books, including those published by the Hogarth Press (#27).

Top 10 Hottest Classes for Next Semester, Yale Daily News
You can take “Virginia Woolf” next year. 4) Great Hoaxes and Fantasies in Archaeology (ANTH 172/ARCG 172, So): How do famous myths about alien encounters, El Dorado or the lost city of Atlantis come about, and how are they used to support nationalism …

What would your epitaph be?, The State Journal-Register
Author Virginia Woolf: “Against you I will fling myself unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” Inventor George Washington Carver: “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world. ..

This Thing Called Life, About – News & Issues
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the heroine spends her day preparing for a party. She collects flowers, prepares her clothing, and makes all the arrangements; but she also recollects her past …

The readers’ room: what you thought of G2 this week, The GuardianVirginia Woolf would, we hope, be proud. We were inspired to count by Kira Cochrane’s cover story in Monday’s G2, in which she questioned why British public life is so conspicuously male-dominated. For four weeks, she counted the bylines of male and …

Delta Dining, Delta Business JournalVirginia Woolf once said, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” If that’s her stance, then Mrs. Woolf must have been a frequent visitor to the many legendary eating establishments around the Mississippi Delta. …

Poetry in devotion, Vancouver Sun
But virtually everybody would know Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Between that and Virginia Woolf, I’d rather be James Hilton. Mind you, I don’t like Virginia Woolf.” ? The Jonas Variations by George Jonas is published by Cormorant Books ($24).

Silence Is Golden, New York Times
There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.” “In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of …

Walking Fitzrovia – try it, Fitzrovia News
This might have needed Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw to have lived in the same building in Fitzroy Square at the same time rather than at different ones or for Augustus John and Dylan Thomas to have a different sort of relationship. …

You Say You Want a Devolution?, Vanity Fair
When high-end literature was being redefined by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, great novels from just 20 years earlier—Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—seemed like relics of …

On track lists and heroines, Limelight Magazine (blog)Virginia Woolf, as portrayed in The Hours, and her struggle in a society that didn’t understand her depression. Gelsomina, from Federico Fellini’s La Strada, and her inspiring strength in enduring abuse in a toxic relationship. These characters are all …

As Virginia Woolf describes it in Orlando, “The Great Frost” of 1608/09 was so severe that “birds froze in mid air and fell like stones to the ground”. Other strange events occurred: “At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her…

Bio chemistry, Columbus Dispatch
In the past 10 years, six actresses have won the top prize for playing real people: Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours; Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in The Monster; Reese Wither-spoon as June Carter in Walk the Line; …

Interview: Nicole Farhi, fashion designer, Scotsman (blog)
If Virginia Woolf were alive today, mused one fashion critic, she would wear Nicole Farhi. Though they remain firm friends, she is no longer with Marks (“It was great until it was not,”) and has been married to the British playwright David Hare for 19 …

Cover story: a year of beautiful books,The Guardian
Even Leonard and Virginia Woolf caught the bug when they bought a press in 1917 and set up shop from a spare room in their Richmond home. Their aim was twofold: to give Virginia a way of calming her jittery nerves (there was nothing so soothing, ...

Read It Again, Sam, New York Times
Many authors also return regularly to Virginia Woolf. The novelist and critic Dale Peck tries to read “The Waves” every year. “It affects me like spiritual instruction,” he said. “I always feel like a better person after I put it down. …

History, reframed, Livemint
London of the 1930s and 1940s was an exciting place with a rich group of intellectuals, like the elite Bloomsbury group consisting of literary giants Virginia Woolf and EM Forster. But the group wasn’t—as is popularly believed—entirely British. ..